When our son who lives in Vancouver calls he never fails to ask what I've been blogging about lately. I hedge on my responses. I do a lot of blogging, and some of them are fairly innocuous pieces focusing on health, medicine, people. Certainly they can be interesting but rarely controversial. On other sites, though, I do post entries that are highly political. And my observations may offend some people, while affirming for others what they feel themselves.

If I speak of those types of postings my son always suggests that I divorce myself from the news. To an extent, in any event; not entirely he means, but from in-depth personal investigation on my part. I'm too committed to commenting, however, to ever do that. I find the news intriguing, alarming and comment-worthy, so I indulge in opinionating on it. I dodge his question and offer a brief narrative sample of the lighter stuff I occasionally write, and the topic moves on.

When, on occasion, I discuss with my husband quite grave issues, it isn't so much a discussion as a confirmation that there are some subjects that are too painful to fully contemplate. They are, in any event, past history. But the past does have a habit of repeating itself, since human nature is such that it too repeats itself; people are imbued with instincts and passions, emotions that suppress cerebral functioning, so that base instincts often trump intelligent decision-making. And apart from that there is a sociopathic element within any society which occasionally rises to power, in the process oppressing those who haven't the aspiration to exert their personalities over others, and become victims.

My husband too suggests that I be more positively selective in what I choose to read, concerned that the constant attention to the miseries of this world has a negative effect on me. But I have grown up reading the kind of material that highlights the misfortune of the world community, since I was a child. I am by disposition not a melancholy person. I enjoy life and treasure it, and feel I have been a most fortunate human being, favoured by fate and the trajectory of my life, and most particularly in my good fortune, having a husband whose companionship is all I've ever wanted.

But if I didn't choose to read the kind of material that I do read, I would never have known, for example, explanations that tell me:
"A second question is quite simply: 'Who was liberated?' For historians of the Holocaust, 'liberation' refers to the one hundred thousand or so Jews who survived the Final Solution that in the preceding four years had claimed six million lives. But Jewish inmates never accounted for more than a relatively small percentage of the total inmate population of the liberated camps; the bulk of the prisoners were common criminals, communists, gypsies, Seventh-Day Adventists, political prisoners, etc. " (That was so because Nazi Germany was consumed by Hitler's orders to kill Jews outright; they were subject to 'special treatment' that no other camp prisoners suffered; instant death in most cases.)

and: "Genocide as such was ended in late 1944, but this did not end the appalling loss of life in the camps. Fully one-third of the Jews in the camps on January 1, 1945, died before liberation, and thousands more died in the first days after the arrival of the Allies. The reasons for this high loss of life are not in dispute. The deaths resulted from the policy of the National Socialist government: Jews were to be allowed to survive only if their survival was of some value to the German war effort. The victims died of over-work, starvation, disease, brutal treatment and random executions. Neither the reasons for the deaths nor the responsibility is at issue, but the fact that two-thirds survived raises questions. Hitler was determined that no Jew would survive the war, and in the SS he had a large number of fanatics who were perfectly willing to carry out his orders. Yet, against all odds, about 100,000 Jews were alive in the camps at the time of liberation. Why? First, some of the SS officers delegated to carry out the final extermination put their own personal safety above obedience to the orders of a collapsing regime and simply walked away. Second, in the last days of the war the Allied armies advanced so rapidly that they were able to frustrate plans for the annihilation of the surviving prisoners. Third, the inmates themselves in several camps were able to frustrate last-minute attempts to kill them. Fourth, various relief organizations, most notably the Swedish Red Cross, saved a number of inmates in the last days of the war."

and, finally: "The post-liberation period was not characterized by any significant attempt on the part of the inmates to extract vengeance from their tormentors in particular, or the German people in general. There were, of course, isolated incidents, but they are remarkably few when one considers the magnitude of the suffering that the inmates had endured. The German people quite justifiably dreaded the day when the victims of the regime were finally free, but in fact when that day finally came very little happened. Those directly responsible for the crimes were in most cases given fair trials, and those only tangentially responsible rarely paid any penalty at all. Why was there no outburst of violence as all the pent-up hatred of years was finally released? The answer is partly to be found in the policy of the Allied armed forces which moved quickly to gain firm control of the camps, even using force in a few instances. But the answer is also to be found in the psychology of the survivors who tended to interpret the Holocaust in such a way that mindless vengeance seemed somehow inappropriate. A major of the Palestinian Brigade addressing a group of survivors in May 1945 exhorted them to 'Unite! Be organized and disciplined!'. That cry became in a sense the watchword of the survivors. The inmates demanded justice, indeed the whole world demanded justice, but in a 'planet loaded with corpses' drumhead courts martial seemed somehow out of place."
The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps, Jon Bridgman

Dachau inmates are ecstatic upon their liberation by the American soldiers in late April, 1945. About 30,000 men, women, and children were freed.
Photo credit: 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division : A Combat history of World War II, Lt. Hugh C. Daly, editor, 1946.